GO, BUD. I have heard all the reasons why Bud Selig should not be in attendance when Barry Bonds breaks Hank Aaron’s all-time homer record. But here is the biggest reason why he should:

It is the right thing to do.

Selig should go because the most important record in baseball is in play, and he should go because this is his chance to do what no commissioner really wants to do: Have a frank discussion about illegal performance enhancers in his sport.

Selig, for once, should not be thinking about his legacy, he should be thinking about honesty. My suspicion is that a frank discussion of this issue will spruce his legacy more permanently than being the godfather of interleague play and the wild card.

Selig should tell the truth, that it is his responsibility as commissioner to be present, but not his joy. When a reporter asks Joe Torre about a talented player who has a discouraging quirk or two, the Yankee manager always says, “If you want the talent, you have to take the personality attached to it.” In other words, you can’t choose your star players’ character traits.

And this is what Selig should make clear in daily exchanges with reporters following the Bonds trail, that in the best of all worlds, this most cherished record would be broken by an amicable player whose integrity was beyond reproach. That is not the case here, and I don’t know why Selig can’t say, “I wish we were here to chronicle a choirboy. We’re not. It’s Bonds.”

Attendance does not mean celebration. If the Giants want to go all bells and whistles, Selig does not have to wear a party hat. He can speak about his conflict, wanting to honor a great achievement, but worried that the achiever might be a dishonorable man. Again, attendance does not mean mandatory participation in a charade. Selig can sum up how he feels about being minister to an entire era of uncertainty.

Selig could use this as penance, hard time and hard questions for being slow to address the steroid issue. And he could use this, most importantly, to launch a mature discussion about illegal performance enhancers because this matter does not die with Bonds’ 756th homer or George Mitchell’s ridiculous investigation. In fact, Mitchell’s investigation and the “tougher” drug testing should fall under the public relations department budget because it’s just designed to con the public (and media) that the situation is under control. It is not.

Players such as Bonds hide behind the ruse that they have not failed a test. But as Lance Williams, co-author of “Game of Shadows,” recently said in Sports Illustrated, places like BALCO exist so those with the means don’t fail tests. That’s the whole point. An inordinate number of the failed tests to date have been by young Latino players. That strongly suggests the failures are about lack of finances and/or know-how. Or do you think only young Latinos are cheating?

“Game of Shadows” is to Bonds what the Dowd Report was to Pete Rose, incontrovertible proof of cheating. In fact, as opposed to Rose with the Dowd Report, Bonds has not even attempted to mount a hollow public assault on the facts in “Game of Shadows.”

So, if you essentially have an IQ, you know what Bonds did, and Selig has an IQ. Fine. He also knows Bonds was not the only one cheating, and he knows the cheating has not ended and that advances in cheating are nearby that are going to make modern steroids look like Wheaties by comparison. More records are going to fall by more controversial folks.

So, again, this is Selig’s chance for a mature discussion with the baseball-loving public. His sport demands players shove 162 games into 181 days, through different time zones and weather conditions. The fans demand performance for the high cost of tickets. Nobody wants to pay Broadway prices and see either understudies or droopy stars.

But the human body is just not naturally built to handle that kind of workload and thrive. So if the fans really want a cleaner game – and I am not sure they do since national TV ratings are up and another attendance record is likely to be set – then we either need fewer games, more off-days or a better way to handle drugs to help performance.

Major League Baseball should, therefore, be having adult discussions about if there is a safe way to take performance enhancers, including amphetamines, which – by the way – have been part of the game since World War II, just in case anybody from a previous generation wants to get too preachy about how clean the game was just yesterday.

Major League Baseball is funding research into a urine test that will detect HGH, which is years away at best and almost certainly will be obsolete by the time it is ever produced – if it is ever produced. It is more fake p.r. Better to take that money and fund studies to learn if there are safer ways to take drugs that exist. This is not a pretty subject for a commissioner to talk about, but Bonds is not a pretty candidate to set this record.

Which makes this as good a time as any for Bud Selig to have this discussion. In this way, bizarrely, maybe Barry Bonds will do something really good for the game.

Joel Sherman’s e-mail address is joel.sherman@nypost.com. “Birth of a Dynasty,” his 10-year retrospective examining how the Yankees soared to the 1996 championship, is available at bookstores and at http://www.amazon.com.